Netanyahu in New York

Benjamin Netanyahu spent last Thursday in Manhattan, in what The New York Sun called a part of a "tour repositioning himself for a return to the Israeli premiership."

He addressed a group at lunch from the Hudson Institute at the Four Seasons (covered here by The New York Sun).  He addressed more than 600 NYU students at Cooper Union that afternoon (covered here by Atlas Shrugs).  Then he spoke at dinner at the St. Regis Hotel to the American Friends of Likud.

Here is a JCI Audio Recording of his dinner speech.  It picks up after some introductory remarks, and starts as follows:

I’m going to take a few minutes to talk about Likud . . .  We suspended this question during the recent war . . . We said in war there is no opposition, and there is no coalition, there is unity for victory [Applause].  And we supported the just war set by the government, and tried to support their achievements.

And we continued this policy of being the loyal opposition, and loyal opposition means loyal to the state, to the people.  And we are.  And when the government does something good – as on occasion it does – we support it.  And when it does something bad, we criticize it.

But the function of an opposition in a parliamentary democracy is to offer an alternative – an alternative vision, alternative leadership, to lead the country, to give it security, to insure its future, to give our citizens prosperity.

We have such a vision.  That vision was put to the voters four months ago.  We were trounced.

Here’s what we said four months ago, to the day. . . . Iran now has two arms.  Iran is a threat to Israel’s existence and aims at annihilating Israel and now it envelopes Israel in two arms.  Hezbollah in the north; Hamas in the south.  And it is just a question of time before rockets will be fired from these enclaves into the heart of the country.

And we said that it would be folly to create a third enclave, a third arm, right over the hills of Tel Aviv, the third being unilateral withdrawal.  Because unilateral withdrawal is far from stopping terrorists.  It encourages and gave it a new basis on which to launch their attack.

We lost the election because people did not hear our message.  They do now. . . . The only disengagement that we had was a disengagement from reality.  There’s a small problem with that.  Reality doesn’t disengage from us.  It came back, in buckets of blood.

So we had to hold fast, and it is unquestionably changing. . . .  And people are asking . . . what must we do to secure the future of Israel?

In the next 20 minutes of his speech, Netanyahu set forth his vision of the military, political, economic, and spiritual renewal that Israel needs. 

His comments about Israel’s history, its economy and its relationship to social justice, the nature of leadership and the character of the current American president, the situation in the world and its historical antecedents, and the battle for the minds of the next generation — all were compelling.  They should be listened to in their entirety:  just click here.

(picture credit:  JCW).